Our conscience gives us rigorous directions and commandments, which sometimes seem to counteract our earthly happiness and show themselves detrimental to our present success. If our life were confined to this world, the demands of our conscience were not only useless and injurious but also in themselves inexplicable. That man, in his religious intuition, also apprehends a reality of a different kind from the material one, appears from the fact that all peoples, in all times and in all stages of evolution, have possessed a religion, as we now do, a certain conception of supernatural things. It may be granted that a great amount of delusion enters into all religions. Nevertheless, religious errors would be inconceivable if man did not apprehend something supernatural which he wrongly interpreted. Superstition would not exist at all, because, as we have already pointed out, nobody can think, speak or form any idea whatever of things that are entirely beyond all experience. To argue with a person about such never-apprehended realities, would be like discussing colors with the blind. But now it is a fact that apprehensions of immaterial substance are so common to man’s consciousness that if we could find somebody who did not understand what we said and meant in speaking about these things, we should be safe in asserting that such a man was not a normal person. But if all men have an immaterial experience, why do ideas and opinions differ so about the same experience, and above all why do some people even deny its existence? The explanation of this surprising contradiction may be understood when we consider that man also possesses a special faculty, his reason, which he must likewise employ. With his reason, man examines and studies all his experiences and strives to bring them into agreement with the laws of thinking. In other words, he strives to systematize them into a philosophy. But this is a hard and laborious task. It is difficult as it is to arrive at right conclusions in regard to the material world to which our senses are responsive. How much more must this be the case in regard to the immaterial world. The evolution of our reason, therefore, is a slowly advancing historical process, presenting a continuous change in opinions, although, at the same time, an inner continuity may be traced, an evolution pointing towards a definite goal.